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day 295 - move, alix nathan

threesixfivestory — Wed, 16 May 2012 02:02:52 +0000

move, alix nathan pp5

ambit volume 206

‘ “‘I love that we’re poles apart,” she said. “Magnetic pull.” ‘

You know, technically this is really pretty competent stuff. It’s not going to blow your mind or gast your flabber; but there is very little wrong with it. But for me, there is a little something lacking – I’ll come back to that.

Often with new emerging writers, and especially with novice writers, there can be a tendency to overstretch oneself, to rush in for the most complexrule breaking genre-defying life-changingpiece of writing. Nathan has chosen not to. And that can be commended.

As an aside, we can expect to encounter a whoe bunch of new and emerging writers, as well as the more renowned, as over the next month or two I turn my focus toward magazines, journals and online publishing – your suggestions as always would be inspirationally welcomed.

Time moves forward in a clear manner. Characterization is present, and quite rounded, if possibly, rather stereotypical.

‘She had class, left-wing credentials, a flat in Fulham.’

‘His origins were humble, but cool determination, order, brain-power had taken him far; would take him further.’

The basics of tenses, paragraph-building, scene-shaping,overall structure, narrative progression have all been well planned, competently executed and neatly polished.

Selina follows Barney when he decided to ‘move’ back to the States. The story plots their relationship from the early passionate ‘moves’ to the later days when they seem to be ‘moving’ apart. Then comes the Bomb, planted by MOVE – a grouo of ‘anarchists, dredlocked family surnamed Africa who wanteed to get back to nature and hated technology.’

Eventually, Selina ‘moves’ out. which is not a problem. In fact the slow process of becoming bored of getting on each other’s nerves seems to have happened a whole lot bloody quicker forhtis reader than it did for the characters themselves, so that actaully you wonder why the hell she didn’t do it earlier instead of going on about old women crying tears for Brahms down their unnaturally orange skin. Or seemingly irrelevant trips on the subway.

The truth is that when it becoms apparent that Selina and Barney must split up – ooh, like from the gradually dawning realisation that nothing else is going to happen – what you really want is for it to be spectacularly apocalyptically horrendous.

And it would be more entertaining if it were. As it is, the unfortunate truth for me is that I didn’t really come to care for either Selina or Barney and so why would I care if they split up? Therefore, I need more.

Frankly I wouldn’t have cared if Selina had slipped in a dangerously wet Tube station and impaled herself on her upturned cello, or if during one more research trip to Jodrell bank Barney’s reciprocatory gravitational magnetic pull with the Earth had been illogically interrupted for a microsecond, causing massive centrifugal forces to catapult him an infinite distance across the ever-expanding cosmos.

Instead, explained to us as a coda / epilogue we are met with The Doppler Effect, but is the writer’s nudge and a wink of self-aware acknowledgement of the metaphor enough to make it work?

Competent but bland. I ended up agreeing with Selina, and desparingly asking myself What for?

‘she told him everything… he was not interested in her observations.’

Let’s finish with a joke -

The Dope-ler Effect: When stoned, ideas travelling towards you at great speeds can mistakenly appear to be closer to genius than they really are.

The Accidental Trekker: communing with too much nature on a Chiang Mai Jungle Trek

Allyson Adair — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 07:15:32 +0000

Growing up in the Pacific Northwest in a house nestled comfortably betwixt cedars, pines, and a bubbling creek was like living in the center of a glorious nature retreat. In the summer, we spent afternoons in the garden, watching the birds and the squirrels flit to and fro, and in the mornings when the sun rose early, you could see the tracks where the bears had been. In the fall, we picked apples from the neighbor’s tree and blackberries from prickly bushes for pies, the berry juice stinging the tiny cuts on our hands. On a clear day, a drive up and down the hills of our town would reward you with sweeping views of the jagged Olympic mountains and their dazzlingly white snowy peaks.

Bangkok, on the other hand…

I suppose every country, with the exclusion of perhaps Finland or Iceland, has its big polluted cities. Thailand itself is beautiful, tropical and green thanks to copious sun and rain. And I can’t say Bangkok is completely without its natural charm (i.e. Lumpini Park), but in a modern city of its size and scope you’re bound to at any time be breathing in more carbon molecules than is good for any human being.

Most of the time I can temper my relentless pining for the natural world by meditating on the single tree outside my apartment window, switching my computer desktop settings to “Ireland”, and going nudist, but when I arrived back in Bangkok after traveling in Europe this summer to find that the green field next to my apartment had become, in my absence, a soup of gravel and mud punctuated by large rusty tractors and groups of workmen living in shacks of corrugated metal with their wives and children, I knew my nudist, tree-meditating days had, sadly, come to an end.

Two dreary, construction-ridden weeks later, my brother flew in to Bangkok to visit me. When I asked him what he wanted to do, he said, “Something outdoors-y”. Of course, that cancelled out Bangkok, so we booked a jungle trek up in Chiang Mai, just me, my brother, and a qualified, experienced jungle guide for three days in the wilderness.

The trek was indeed the end-all answer to all of my nature longings, but in a way that neither of us had bargained for.

To be fair, Chiang Mai was a lovely city with a refreshing, laid-back ambiance. After a slight fiasco at the airport, where there were no money changers and the bank shut down my brother’s ATM card (because alas – someone was using it in a foreign country!), we made it to our hotel just in time for the Sunday night market. Our guide came by the hotel to meet us and make sure we paid for the trek.

“Anything in particular we should bring?” I asked, adding, as a joke, “Toilet paper?”

“Yes, of course, toilet paper,” he said. His name was Doh and he was a man of few words, but, we thought at the time, in more of a distracted than unfriendly way.

We made sure to stop by 7-Eleven and pick up a packet of tissues. I wondered, as I packed my little Rick Steves handbag for the trek, if we were really as prepared as we should have been for our wildlife adventure.

Doh picked us up bright and early the next morning and put us in the open back of his pickup truck. Our first stop, the elephant camp, was only an hour outside the city. We lined up with the other tourists for a ride on the elephants’ backs. Dave (that’s my brother) and I clambered onto the big wooden chair on Boonyan the elephant’s back. A few minutes into the ride, our mahout vaulted off to go roll a joint, so Dave and I took turns sitting on the elephant’s head.

Meanwhile our elephant – a rebelephant, if you will (those were my brother’s words) – got into trouble, running ahead of the other elephants into the river to pull down a delicious-looking tree. All the other elephants crowded around the feast, and it took all the mahouts hacking at their haunches with pickaxes to get them moving again.

Afterward, we said farewell to our fellow tourists and climbed back into our pickup truck. The quiet, and eventually severely turbulent (oh how I longed for an exercise bra!) 2-hour drive that ensued wasn’t exactly what we were expecting – we were looking forward to a bit of commentary, or perhaps a bathroom break, but there was no way to communicate with our guide as he was busy chatting with the driver inside the truck. Eventually we did stop for a picnic lunch, which was fried chicken and sticky rice that we shared with the ants and the bees on the forest floor. It would have been an ideal time to get to know Doh, but he walked up to the highest point of the hill so he could talk on his cell phone.

“Everything ok?” I asked when he came back.

“Here you can use cell phone.”

“What about where we’re going?”

“No more cell phone.”

I made one last frantic call home to Chris to let him know I’d be unreachable for the next couple of days and managed to leave him a message. We drove on through the mountains and fields, losing reception and gaining altitude, and pulled a tarp down around us when it started pouring down rain. Finally we reached our destination, a couple of bamboo huts and a shack painted white with the sign stenciled on in blue, “Christian aid of Norway.” Later we found out that this seemingly abandoned shack, manned occasionally by a Norwegian doctor, was the only medical center for the entire region.

From here, we happily parted ways with the pickup truck and set off on a small dirt road that led down the mountain and into the jungle. It’s the jungle that was branded into my eyes for three days, and would appear to me afterward for weeks like a green blaze when I closed them. Like the red leech bites from my skin, it’s beginning to fade from my memory, and the pictures we took, while monochrome and exact, don’t conjure up the feeling of wildness and adventure in the same way that the jungle of our experience did.

Two hours into our trek, the road started thinning out and my pack, while being the lightest by far, made its presence known by digging into my shoulders. We still had no words from Doh, as he was chatting amicably to the villager accompanying us in Karen, which is a completely different language from Thai. I tried taking on the language, thinking it would warm him up to us a little.

“So, Doh, why don’t you teach me some good words in Karen?”

“There are no good words in Karen.”

“What about hello? How do you say hello?”

“We don’t say hello in Karen.”

“What about “have you eaten rice yet?” like they say in Thai?”

“Yes, you can say that.” Then, a few seconds’ thought later, “No, actually, you can’t.”

When Doh talked with the villagers, I kept hearing the word, “dale, dale,” so, not to be defeated, I asked Doh what it meant.

“What?”

“Dale”

“What?”

“Dale”

“Yes, it means “what?””

Despite our guide’s reticence to share with us his native language, we did pick up a few phrases in Karen just by keeping our ears open. In addition to “what?”, for example, we learned that “lasso” is the dark moon period when the villagers take a break from working in the rice fields, “lo bokok” is “he/she/I live in Bangkok”, and “saw” is “leech.” With these useful phrases, Dave and I could have full conversations.

“I live in Bangkok?”

“Dark moon. What?”

“Leech. What?”

“I live in Bangkok” …and so on.

That first afternoon, we took a break in one of the larger villages, where perhaps 100 families lived. Our guide disappeared, but the villager who had walked with us stayed and gave us miniature cobs of boiled corn to eat. He spoke some Thai, as well as a few words in English, and from this hodgepodge of languages we found out that he was in his early 20s, married, had a daughter and loved playing football. Then, the animals in the village must have sensed tourists coming, because they all gallivanted over to us, so we sat and pet the cats and dogs while watching the little Karen children walk home from school. The dog found an instant best friend in my brother and tried to climb into his lap.

“Ladyboy,” said the villager, pointing meaningfully at the dog.

After forty-five minutes or so, our guide reappeared and we set off again on our trek. The village quickly fell away behind us, replaced by more rice field and jungle forest. I kept getting the sensation that a bug was crawling up my arm, and slapping it, until I turned back and saw the villager walking behind me with a big blade of grass in his hand and a smile on his face. Every so often, Doh would shout out greetings to villagers on the far hills whom we could hardly see. After living in cities for six years, it was quite surreal to speak to someone outdoors from so far away and actually be able to hear them. Doh would translate for us haphazardly, so we found out that one man was angry, because last time the foreign trekkers came through, they took a picture of him and promised to come back and show him. Did Doh know when they were coming back? Another man said the government was trying to get him to go to school, but he was perfectly happy in his rice field, thank you very much. Most of their conversations seemed to revolve around farming, weather and path conditions, who had the best rice, and what fruits and vegetables were in season.

After our last exhausting trek of the day, we finally arrived in the Karen village where we would stay for the night. This is and was the hardest thing to write about and also to experience.

As soon as we arrived, Doh said, “explore village” and disappeared (unbeknownst to us at the time, to cook dinner in one of the bamboo huts), leaving us in an awkward staring contest with the family of the house. I tried speaking some Thai, but while they seemed to understand a bit they only answered with smiles. Their two adorable children hid behind the stilts of the house and gave us unbreaking, wide-eyed stares throughout the entire evening. They were the only ones who seemed truly curious enough to come and talk with us. A cat came and made itself comfortable on David’s lap. I decided then that pets and children are perhaps the only true cross-cultural constants in the world. Still, I felt like a kind of traveling failure, having failed to connect with the locals, and so we sat in silence on a wooden bench for two hours while the sun took its time going down. The family moved inside. Laughter, candlelight and conversation began emanating from inside the bamboo houses, but no one invited us in, and we still saw neither head nor tail of our guide, so we sat outside in the dark. Finally, our guide walked out of the house, set down three bowls of vegetables on the table, then walked back in without a word. We ate over a single candle in the deepening night, and when we couldn’t eat any more (the slight taste of sugar-substitute and lighter fluid dampened even our prodigious appetites), turned in to the bamboo hut a few meters away from the family’s house. We stacked the grey cotton blankets inside as high as possible, but the bamboo slats still poked through. Just as we were dropping the mosquito nets down and blowing out our candles, Doh stepped in.

“What? You go to bed? Already?”

“Is there anything for us to do?” I asked, trying to keep the growing resentment out of my voice.

Doh thought for a moment. “You want to see house?”

He took us not to our host family’s home but to another family’s house in the village. We took off our shoes and climbed up the bamboo rungs. It was a big house, like two houses joined, but like all the houses rustic and simple inside, a floor covered in blankets and tools hanging on the walls. We sat cross-legged on the floor around a small fire while the family of three (one man and two women) made green tea for us in bamboo cups. Doh struck up a lively conversation with them for the next hour. On multiple occasions the women looked at me and asked a question, but he answered on my behalf without stopping to translate. Eventually, David politely removed the orange kitten from his lap and we left the smoky interior of the hut for our own bamboo abode. As we lay there in the complete and utter dark, the cicadas’ relentless alarm punctuated by grunts from the pigs and the sporadic croaking of frogs, the sense of panic which had been steadily growing inside me all night took ahold of me. I hadn’t felt this lost and frightened since I was six and went to sleep over at my older brother’s house across the Puget Sound. At midnight, I had panicked and begged to be taken home, so he took me on the 12:30 ferry all the way back to my parent’s house where they had to drive to pick me up. Laying there in the middle of the jungle, my spine bumping against the stiff wooden slats and an unfamiliar blanket scratching the bites on my legs, it was as if no time had passed between me being six and twenty-three. If there had been a 12:30 ferry to take us home that night, I would’ve been on it in a heartbeat. Still, the impossibility of leaving stared me in the face through the dark. No thoughts could console me or lull me to sleep, so eventually I took the blankets out from under me and bunched them up against my back, imagining I was at home with Chris sleeping silently behind me.

That first sleepless night broke something in me, and I learned that I’d have to meet and surrender to whatever circumstance befell us during the next few days. Physically, we still had a long way to go, but mentally I was almost there.

The sky the next morning was bright and open, with no clouds to temper the beating sun. It was to be our biggest trekking day, with 8 hours on the move. After barely surviving our first “mini-day” of trekking and completely sleepless night, I wondered how we would make it through. It didn’t help that the first two hours were dead straight uphill. My leg muscles were shaking so badly I could hardly lift one foot to put it in front of the other. Everyone else – our guide, my brother, and the new villager accompanying us – were caked in dust and sweat and panting, but fine. The hot mist steamed up from the rice fields and pooled in my eyes, rolling down in hot, bitter tears. What if I really couldn’t make it? We were miles and miles away from any roads. Even if we could reach the road again, it would take the car four hours coming from Chiang Mai. Soon my woeful reasonings were interrupted by a growing itch on my leg. I pulled up my khakhis to take a look, and there was a big fat leech sucking away at my ankle. Doh burned him (and some of my skin) off with a lighter, and for the rest of the day the uncongealed blood pooled in my water-shoes.

After that, I began to see my body in a new way. No longer was it a doll, to be sculpted, pinched, primped, alternately despised and adored. It was now a noble thing capable of survival. I marveled at its self-healing powers, how mosquito welts faded, cuts closed up magically after only a few days, and muscles spasming in pain still obeyed my impulses to move. When I felt like giving up (and very well would have, given the choice), it was the resilience of my own flesh and bones that kept me going. For a few hours in the jungle, I wasn’t an American or a singer or an expat or even a Christian, but a human being staying alive.

We were extremely lucky with the weather all that second day. We took a high mountain route in order to avoid the leeches, which added two more hours to our trek and staved off their blood-sucking pursuits for about the same amount of time. At one point, we all collapsed on the ground in the hot sun while Doh hacked at a pineapple with his machete, tossing us the prickly chunks.

“On the website it says people can do this trek from age 7 to 83,” I told him in in disbelief.

“Maybe not this trek,” he said, “We have many trekking areas. Older people, we say is better for half-day trek.”

“What do you do if someone can’t finish it?”

“It’s no good when that happens.”

“Why, does that happen often?”

Doh looked at the ground and nodded sadly.

After our pineapple break and a trek through river territory, we arrived at a two-hut camp next to a small waterfall. Doh and the villager made a shower by redirecting the river’s course with a complicated bamboo contraption. Dave and I watched them from a distance while tearing the leeches off our skin. The little demons left marks on our feet and we soon bled through all our socks. We ate fried rice on banana leaves drenched with soy sauce from a plastic coke bottle, no longer thinking, just watching the spiders and crickets crawl over our pant legs. Big clouds began to roll over, along with a clap of thunder, but Doh and the villager made no sign of moving.

“Shouldn’t we continue on to the rafting camp where we’re spending the night?” I asked.

“Best to wait for the rain here,” Doh answered. Still, all my rain sensibilities from growing up in the Northwest were telling me that we had some time before the clouds broke. I didn’t want to think about how happy the little bloodsucking monsters would be if we had to wade to the camp while up to our knees in mud. Eventually I persuaded our regiment to get a move on. Three hours and countless leeches later, we arrived at the raft camp and put down our packs in the giant bamboo hut the tour company had recently constructed on the riverbank. Not two seconds later, the clouds broke loose and rained down in torrents, complete with thunder and lightning. Dave and I popped on our suits and reveled barefoot in the rain. The rain washed away the blood, the sweat, and all of the grime, till we were two white sparkling bodies in the jungle. Eventually it got too cold for comfort, so we took refuge in the big hut we had all to ourselves. Doh disappeared again (unbeknownst to us, to build a giant bamboo raft for the next day’s adventure) but we didn’t mind so much this time. We played hangman with the broken pencil that the villager had glued together for us (another story in itself), then, when the rain abated, Dave showed me how to do bowstaff tricks with our bamboo walking poles. Doh cooked us dinner again, all vegetables he had picked alongside the path while we trekked, and while it still had that signature lighter-fluid taste, we were already in a better mood and thankful for the sustenance.

After dinner, we were sitting outside at the big wooden table enjoying the peacefulness of the jungle when an old man appeared out of nowhere and took a seat next to my brother. He had a tanned face, withered and wizened from years of smoking, and pale, watery eyes that both me and my brother later recalled being blue. He also had the air of someone with no personal bubble to speak of, and scooted up close to my brother so their thighs were touching. Mind you, it was a wide bench and an even wider raft camp, so he had no excuse. My brother and I exchanged subtle, meaningful glances, wondering if it was just jungle hospitality, but then the man started squeezing Dave’s biceps and rubbing his belly. His arm snaked around his back and held him close, meanwhile my brother politely tried to pretend nothing was happening.

“Does he have a girlfriend?” the man asked me in Thai.

“Oh yes, he has a good woman at home,” I said, emphasizing the gender since the Thai word for “boyfriend/girlfriend” is the same.

The man chuckled but made no move to back off. I asked about his family. He said his wife was dead, but he had two young boys. A few minutes later, they came to join us around the fire. David eventually managed to extricate himself from the tribesman’s embrace, and we escaped back into our giant hut, wishing there was some kind of door to lock. With nothing else to do, we figured we’d use up the last of our camera battery and spent the next few hours doing impressive flashlight art while evading mosquitoes.

The next morning reality hit as I rolled off my blanket and saw a squashed spider there, and in my leg a neat pair of teethmarks. What was worse, however, was that we were almost out of tissues, had no trash bags (except for a carefully designated pocket in my backpack), and it was, as it always is by Murphy’s law, that time of the month.

Doh came to wake us up and we had French toast for breakfast, that is, sweet white bread soaked in oil and sugar. I had a drink with all the color, if none of the flavor, of hot chocolate, then we set about on our rafting adventure. A giant bamboo raft 6 meters long had magically appeared in the river overnight, thanks to our handy guide. As it had literally just been constructed, the wood was still heavy and so it sunk about a foot when we stepped onto it. The next two hours were a challenging, if exciting balancing act as we gripped the slippery logs with our feet. From the shore, it probably looked like the four of us were floating miraculously down the river while standing. One of the old tribesman’s sons expertly guided the raft from the front, while Doh directed it from the back with a long bamboo pole. It was so freeing to simply stand there and let the river carry us along. The villagers have travelled this way for centuries, entire villages moving down the river in trains upon trains of rafts, but now motorcycles are becoming more widespread. Still, we didn’t see a single motorcycle during our trek.

Without any warning, we reached our destination and Doh stopped the raft by ramming it into the riverbank. In one fell swoop, a branch crawling with biting ants whipped me in the face, and they fell into my shirt while I lost my balance, skinning my knee on the hard bamboo. A few minutes later, we set out on the path again, and David’s nose started bleeding. Between the bug bites, all the blood, the whooping cough I had picked up on my first sleepless night, sunburn, blisters and bruises, we were a pretty sorry sight. Thankfully, it was our last day, and after 3 more hours of trekking, a 4 hour drive and lunch at the Huai Say Luang waterfall, Doh dropped us off directly at the airport with a quick wave goodbye. We had two hours to kill before our flight, so we threw away our shoes in a dumpster, changed shirts and downed two bags of Reeses pieces and Starbursts. I’m sure our fellow passengers were grateful that we each had a window and an aisle with no one in between, because by that time we could no longer smell ourselves.

Sitting there on the plane, thinking about how blissful it would be to stand in my air-conditioned bathroom and take a heated shower, then after drying myself with a big, clean towel, how I would crawl into my giant king size bed complete with pillows and sheets, turning on and off the lights as I pleased…I realized I had undergone a complete paradigm shift in only three days. I thanked my lucky stars that I lived in a big, crowded, congested city rather than in the faraway, wild middle of nowhere, subject to the fickle forces of nature.

Of course, now that I’ve been back in the city for a few months, I’m starting to miss the great outdoors again, the rhythm of night and day, seeing the moon and stars at night, marveling at how humans can survive off the land with wisdom passed down for generations…but for now I think I’ll settle for a walk in the park.